


Lost & Found

by persnickett



Category: Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: M/M, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-03
Updated: 2014-03-03
Packaged: 2018-01-14 10:59:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,380
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1263829
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/persnickett/pseuds/persnickett
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the middle of the apocalypse Daryl Dixon meets someone who changes his life even more than the end of the world.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lost & Found

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Severina](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Severina/gifts).



> This story was lost on my hard drive for a long while. It's actually pieces of several I started for Severina when she bought me in 2012’s rainbow_support auction. I found the pieces and put some of them together for her birthday. It’s firmly set in Season One, and I hope it helps make her special day a little brighter.

The wasps rise into the air angrily as the fallen fruit rolls over at the nudge of his boot – just enough to reveal the stone in its innards, furrowed like an expanse of exposed brain matter. But they’re only to be stirred for a moment before they’re back to their sticky, fetid meal; heads like tiny masked skulls nodding busily as their mandibles cut into the rancid flesh.  
  
It was a day just like this one, the first time he set a foot down in the mossy clearing of what had been an orchard once. It's a makeshift shooting range these days, hung now with homemade bulls-eyes and tin-can targets.  
  
The heat was shimmering the air that first day, and the peaches were already heavy with that over-ripeness that is just before rotten, not quite putrid but just on the edge.  
  
The reek of them was in the air, thick and heavy, oppressive. A reminder of the inescapability of endings. That rotting, putrid flesh is everywhere now...  
  
**  
  
Daryl can hear a rustling from upwind that ain’t no squirrel. Raccoon, or possum maybe.  
  
Or something worse.  
  
He’s seen some powerful fucked-up shit in the past few days. A wheel of confused buzzards trailing what used to be a man in tattered overalls, swooping down in turns to tear off swaths of flesh, as he shambled relentlessly on, looking no more concerned than as if swatting at flies. The little redheaded slip of a thing wandering the side of the highway in a dirty nightie, and looking a lot like the youngest daughter from the Keebler farm up the road – except for the head lolling to the side on a neck bent at an unnatural angle, one pigtail hanging inches lower than the other from a flap of scalp peeled clean away from the skull.  
  
Daryl inches forward, just out of the brush into the clearing, bow raised and at the ready. Another little bout of rustling and then something drops down out of the leaves and into view. A leg, human.  
  
He keeps the bow raised, but eases his finger off the trigger. As far as he knows, possums don’t wear Converse sneakers, and those undead freak show rejects don’t softly mutter “ow”. Or “…fuck me.”  
  
Next thing, there’s a boy in jeans and a dingy, smudged ball cap, swinging himself nimbly from the branches to land lightly on his toes like he’s auditioning for Batman and Robin or some shit. He has the handle of a plastic bucket full of peaches clenched between his teeth, but he sets it down in favour of a wooden baseball bat leaning against the tree trunk – no doubt the kid’s idea of an insurance policy against the geeks.  
  
The kid hasn’t noticed him yet. Daryl watches him dust both hands off on the ass of his jeans before picking up the bucket in his left hand, bat in the right.  
  
It’d be like something out of one of those old Rockwell paintings in the waiting room at the walk-in clinic where he took Merle to get patched up that time he tangled with the coyote that kept getting at the chicken coop. If it weren't for it being the end of the world and all.  
  
“Shit,” the boy curses, finally noticing him. He drops the bucket and takes a two handed grip on the bat.  
  
“Ain’t gonna hurtcha,” Daryl growls, “Relax.” But he punctuates it with a jab of his bow in the direction of the bat, just in case the kid doesn’t.  
  
He’s already letting the makeshift weapon swing loose in his hand anyway, as if he hasn’t noticed the crossbow at all. Seems having a heartbeat and the power of speech is enough to earn him more trust than this kid should probably be handing out these days.  
  
“Hey! More survivors,” he exclaims, moving forward excitedly. “We’ve been looking for survivors!”  
  
“We?”  
  
“Yeah,” says the kid, smiling like it’s not the God forsaken apocalypse. It's bright, and perfect in a way that says he probably had braces once. Probably never sat in a walk-in clinic in his life. “We’ve got a whole camp, just over that ridge.”  
  
Close up, the kid is probably a little older than he looked at first - with his cap and bat, and what kind of grown man climbs God-dang trees, for fuck’s sakes.  
  
He turns around to go after his spilled peach bucket.  
  
The peaches won’t be any good anyhow; rotting from the inside, where you can’t see. But this kid doesn't know how to tell. Not this upmarket city boy with his flimsy sneakers, no good for anything but city sidewalks, and his imported olive skin and exotic eyes.  
  
He’ll learn. He’s gonna learn the hard way about trusting strange folk he meets with information like the location of his camp, too, if he keeps this kind of thing up.  
  
Daryl will have to head back now, and tell Merle the news, of course. And he has a feeling Merle’ll be real interested to hear of an encampment just over the ridge that’s more than likely full of food, clean water. Maybe even some women.  
  
Probably a little too interested.  
  
Daryl watches him bend over, scrabbling up the useless fruit to take back to his people.  
  
He's probably just as hungry as Daryl feels. They've been living off jerky and tobacco for days. He doesn't have the heart to tell him they're standing in ruined paradise, a wasted eden that'll do no living soul any good until at least next spring.  
  
If there were any living souls left.  
  
He’ll learn, Daryl thinks again darkly, in the kind of days that are ahead. It makes him feel like a traitor, but he can’t help wishing for some reason that this gangly kid with his naïve weapon and his dirty ball cap didn’t have to. Wishing that he didn’t have a sneaking suspicion he would learn it sooner than one might expect.  
  
**  
  
“So we’ll need a couple more volunteers,” says the old man. “Glenn, you’re the expert here, how many men – sorry Andrea,” he claps a hand down on her shoulder and Andrea smiles, shaking her head. “How many _volunteers_ do you think you’ll need in the party to make it through the city with enough supplies for the group?”  
  
Daryl has barely taken a step forward when Merle holds out a hand.  
  
“You can stay back and see to the huntin’, little brother. Old Merle’ll keep an eye on the ladies.” Merle throws out his chest, adjusts his belt. He’s been trying to get Andrea alone for days, and with Dale and Shane staying back in the camp, he probably figures it’s the next best thing. “… And your boy, here.” Merle adds, with a smile.  
  
Andrea gives an open roll of the eyes she doesn’t trouble to hide, and Daryl keeps his gaze turned carefully away from Glenn, but he can hear his sneaker-heels shift nervously in the dust all the same.  
  
He’s been trailing around after Daryl maybe a little too much to escape Merle’s notice. Casting openly admiring looks at his crossbow, pestering him for things like borrowing his sharpening stone and suggesting shit like shooting lessons for the group.  
  
Daryl keeps his eyes on Merle. It’s not hard to read the knowing look in his brother’s eye – or the challenge there, daring him to return it, to insist on joining the supply run. Glenn’s supply run. Daring him to prove him right.  
  
Daryl looks back down at the hatchet in his hands. He nods his agreement and turns back to the woodpile.  
  
**  
  
“Even I think it’s a bad idea,” Daryl says, “and I don’t even like you much.”  
  
“It’s a _good_ idea,” Glenn insists, turning pleading eyes back on The Sheriff. But not before flicking him the quickest sliver of a wounded glance.  
  
It’s just enough guilt to make him feel even more pissed off than before, if such a thing’s possible.  
  
Getting Merle back is messing up his brain, it’s all he can think about. It was the cop that left Merle up on that rooftop, not Glenn. This whole thing has him acting like a hot-head idot, and talking like a jackass. The plan isn’t actually a bad one.  
  
“Why me?” Daryl says anyway, when Glenn gets to the part about the two of them alone in a dead end alleyway. It comes out a bit too quickly.  
  
“Because your crossbow is quieter than his gun.”  
  
There it is again. That look, God damn it. Earnest, and too-open. Just a bare-faced admiration – if a little grudging, what with the guff Daryl was just giving him. But there was respect there all the same.  
  
Respect he never saw once in his father’s eyes, and not on his brother’s face, either. Not in the averted eyes of the snooty city kids lining the walls of the old high school Merle told him he’d never need anyhow the day he dropped out to help out at home for the trapping season.  
  
“Hey kid,” he says. “What’d you do before all this?” It ain’t much of an olive branch, but the truth is Daryl sort of wants to know.  
  
Glenn looks up from his scribbled map of the city, surprised at the sudden change in his tone.  
  
“Delivered pizzas,” he answers. “…Why?”  
  
**  
  
“Knew I’d find you here,” the voice cuts through the heavy, cloying air of the orchard, thick with the sweet stink of rotten fruit and the lazy, opportunistic buzzing of the wasps.  
  
Glenn is leaned up against the rough bark of a peach tree. He’s got a perfect-looking globe of the fruit cupped in the palms of both hands, but he’s not biting. It’ll be foul inside, decaying and mouldering around the stone. Kid can tell that, now.  
  
“This is where you come to blow off steam, isn’t it?” Glenn says, trying out a tentative looking smile. “Find your zen.”  
  
“Come here to shoot,” Daryl replies, pointing the bow down and setting an arrow.  
  
“Right.” Glenn says, sounding like he might have caught on already that, for Daryl, it comes to the same thing. “Well I came here to thank you.”  
  
“Already thanked me.”  
  
“Not for the nursing home, you were the only ones who thought you were saving my life. I was never in any real danger," he points out. "Well maybe from Old Mrs Alvarez. I beat her in Go Fish. She took out her teeth just to give me a proper cursing out in Spanish. Pretty sure she was swearing a wicked vendetta.”  
  
Daryl raises the bow, instead of looking over at him. He knows why Glenn is here, he's just not up to smiling about it yet.  
  
“I came to say thank you for listening. I mean for…stopping. What you were doing, and actually listening to me back there. About not putting our people on the fire." Glenn says, haltingly. "Especially now.”  
  
Daryl looks over at him then, but now Glenn is the one with his eyes down. His thumbs dent gently into the skin of the peach in his hands.  
  
“Hell’s that supposed to mean?”  
  
Glenn looks up. His expression is stricken.  
  
“Well you just lost your brother…”  
  
“Lost ‘im?” Daryl cuts in, eyes back on the target. “Didn’t lose nothin’. Stubborn ass don’t wanna be found." Daryl looses the arrow, and misses by a country mile. He curses under his breath. "He knows where to find me."  
  
It's not lost on either of them though, that it's been the better part of twenty-four hours and Merle hasn't.  
  
What Glenn doesn't know, is that what's got him out here - what has him missing easy shots and feeling sick to his core - is that he just might be beginning to stop wondering why Merle hasn't made his way back, and starting to think it may be better in some ways if he doesn't.  
  
He just watched Carol chop up her husband like a butcher with a side of beef. He'd seen that look before, the wild desperation, the fear and grief and hate. He'd seen Merle do much the same thing when they came home from school one afternoon to find their father on the floor, cold as a stone.  
  
Things had changed after that. The hitting stopped, mostly, but other than that, it hadn't gotten what Daryl could call 'better'. It used to be him and Merle against the world. After that, Merle stopped being his brother, and started being a father.  
  
And he'd only ever had one example to follow.  
  
"Daryl..." Glenn begins, but it's as far as he gets.  
  
"I'm not out here for him," Daryl says. It's the closest to an explanation he's probably going to be able to muster. "Here for a shooting lesson."  
  
Glenn nods, taking the words as a dismissal. Daryl is sure he sees him cast one last admiring look at his crossbow before he chucks the peach in his hands into the bush, turns to go.  
  
"Stick around," Daryl says, "you might learn somethin’.”  
  
It takes a second, for the words to sink in, but when Glenn whirls back around those fancy imported eyes go wide with excitement.  
  
“You ain’t touchin’ anything yet.” Daryl warns. “Watch me a while first.”  
  
“I’ve been watching you for weeks.”  
  
Glenn is earnest enough when he says it, but Daryl looks sideways at him and he smiles as the double meaning sinks in, the tips of his ears going pink.  
  
It's a mark of something, some kind of change in the simmering air, that Daryl feels free enough suddenly to smile back.  
  
When Glenn does get his turn to hold the bow, his stance is relaxed and ready. Nothing like Daryl, nervous and high strung on his first shoot. He can feel it in the warm, easy way Glenn's shoulder comes back against his chest when Daryl moves in to correct his grip.  
  
Glenn is a fast learner, and maybe Daryl doesn't make such a bad teacher. Maybe Glenn was onto something with his idea that some shooting lessons might help protect their people.  
  
Daryl doesn't have much idea how to go about it; protecting, comforting. He’d never had the lessons.  
  
But at least now, maybe he could have the chance to find out.  
  



End file.
